Classifying information that has subjectively perceived attributes or characteristics is difficult. When the information is one or more musical compositions, classification is complicated by the widely varying subjective perceptions of the musical compositions by different listeners. One listener may perceive a particular musical composition as “hauntingly beautiful” whereas another may perceive the same composition as “annoyingly twangy.”
In the classical music context, musicologists have developed names for various attributes of musical compositions. Terms such as adagio, fortissimo, or allegro broadly describe the strength with which instruments in an orchestra should be played to properly render a musical composition from sheet music. In the popular music context, there is less agreement upon proper terminology. Composers indicate how to render their musical compositions with annotations such as brightly, softly, etc., but there is no consistent, concise, agreed-upon system for such annotations.
As a result of rapid movement of musical recordings from sheet music to pre-recorded analog media to digital storage and retrieval technologies, this problem has become acute. In particular, as large libraries of digital musical recordings have become available through global computer networks, a need has developed to classify individual musical compositions in a quantitative manner based on highly subjective features, in order to facilitate rapid search and retrieval of large collections of compositions.
Musical compositions and other information are now widely available for sampling and purchase over global computer networks through online merchants such as Amazon.com, Inc., barnesandnoble.com, cdnow.com, etc. A prospective consumer can use a computer system equipped with a standard Web browser to contact an online merchant, browse an online catalog of pre-recorded music, select a song or collection of songs (“album”), and purchase the song or album for shipment direct to the consumer. In this context, online merchants and others desire to assist the consumer in making a purchase selection and desire to suggest possible selections for purchase. However, current classification systems and search and retrieval systems are inadequate for these tasks.
A variety of inadequate classification and search approaches are now used. In one approach, a consumer selects a musical composition for listening or for purchase based on past positive experience with the same artist or with similar music. This approach has a significant disadvantage in that it involves guessing because the consumer has no familiarity with the musical composition that is selected.
In another approach, a merchant classifies musical compositions into broad categories or genres. The disadvantage of this approach is that typically the genres are too broad. For example, a wide variety of qualitatively different albums and songs may be classified in the genre of “Popular Music” or “Rock and Roll.”
In still another approach, an online merchant presents a search page to a client associated with the consumer. The merchant receives selection criteria from the client for use in searching the merchant's catalog or database of available music. Normally the selection criteria are limited to song name, album title, or artist name. The merchant searches the database based on the selection criteria and returns a list of matching results to the client. The client selects one item in the list and receives further, detailed information about that item. The merchant also creates and returns one or more critics' reviews, customer reviews, or past purchase information associated with the item.
For example, the merchant may present a review by a music critic of a magazine that critiques the album selected by the client. The merchant may also present informal reviews of the album that have been previously entered into the system by other consumers. Further, the merchant may present suggestions of related music based on prior purchases of others. For example, in the approach of Amazon.com, when a client requests detailed information about a particular album or song, the system displays information stating, “People who bought this album also bought . . . ” followed by a list of other albums or songs. The list of other albums or songs is derived from actual purchase experience of the system. This is called “collaborative filtering.”
However, this approach has a significant disadvantage, namely that the suggested albums or songs are based on extrinsic similarity as indicated by purchase decisions of others, rather than based upon objective similarity of intrinsic attributes of a requested album or song and the suggested albums or songs. A decision by another consumer to purchase two albums at the same time does not indicate that the two albums are objectively similar or even that the consumer liked both. For example, the consumer might have bought one for the consumer and the second for a third party having greatly differing subjective taste than the consumer. As a result, some pundits have termed the prior approach as the “greater fools” approach because it relies on the judgment of others.
Another disadvantage of collaborative filtering is that output data is normally available only for complete albums and not for individual songs. Thus, a first album that the consumer likes may be broadly similar to second album, but the second album may contain individual songs that are strikingly dissimilar from the first album, and the consumer has no way to detect or act on such dissimilarity.
Still another disadvantage of collaborative filtering is that it requires a large mass of historical data in order to provide useful search results. The search results indicating what others bought are only useful after a large number of transactions, so that meaningful patterns and meaningful similarity emerge. Moreover, early transactions tend to over-influence later buyers, and popular titles tend to self-perpetuate.
In a related approach, the merchant may present information describing a song or an album that is prepared and distributed by the recording artist, a record label, or other entities that are commercially associated with the recording. A disadvantage of this information is that it may be biased, it may deliberately mischaracterize the recording in the hope of increasing its sales, and it is normally based on inconsistent terms and meanings.
In still another approach, digital signal processing (DSP) analysis is used to try to match characteristics from song to song, but DSP analysis alone has proven to be insufficient for classification purposes. While DSP analysis may be effective for some groups or classes of songs, it is ineffective for others, and there has so far been no technique for determining what makes the technique effective for some music and not others. Specifically, such acoustical analysis as has been implemented thus far suffers defects because 1) the effectiveness of the analysis is being questioned regarding the accuracy of the results, thus diminishing the perceived quality by the user and 2) recommendations can only be made if the user manually types in a desired artist or song title from that specific website. Accordingly, DSP analysis, by itself, is unreliable and thus insufficient for widespread commercial or other use.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method of classifying information that is characterized by the convergence of subjective or perceptual analysis and DSP acoustical analysis criteria. With such a classification technique, it would be desirable to provide the capability to dynamically generate playlists that reflect various pre-defined and interactive restrictions. It would be further desirable to provide a system and methods as a result of which participating users are offered playlists based upon users' input. It would be still further desirable to aggregate a range of media objects of varying types or categories using various categorization and prioritization methods.